In the late 1980s, NCR came out with the Teradata machine. It was a very powerful warehouse machine capable of processing more data than most could imagine at the time, hence the name. 15-20 years later, machines and databases handling terabytes of data were fairly common, so….

In the late 2000s, Oracle releases Exadata, again able to process more data than most have ever dealt with before.

Both shining examples of what is called “Marketing Overstatement” to make a point.

Calling the new wave of machines “Big Data” is merely capitulation – it no longer makes sense to exaggerate or predict how much data these machines may actually be able to process, so there’s no advantage in trying…